Essentially, then, the gentle strum that hides the anxious, slightly askew heart, equal parts willowy and angsty,Songs from Motel 43 – and its author – belies its range of influences while embracing them with a warm Southern hug. The scrapes on the acoustic’s fretboard during “Done Movin’ On,” while inescapably iconic, are mic’ed up so high they pierce the piece’s simple beauty with the sense of a jabbing sharp pain, making it seem like this fresh-faced, barely-begun-shaving kid’s possessed down to his marrow by Bukka White or somebody. “Motel 43″‘s country clop could’ve been programmed by Conny Plank, the pedal steel haunting like a Louisiana synth and yet the track still rises and drifts all misty and fine, its cantoring existentialism both homespun and world-weary before its author’s time, while “The River (For Nels)” – one assumes Cline? – bristles with the quiet restlessness of a young man weighing young man options, the song heavy with all the ruminative equivocation suggested by Bourne’s doubled up guitars – a heartfelt acoustic strummed and picked with a lifer’s surety, an electric picking out an incidental lead that’s as country sweet as it is awash in a tossed-off rockist nonchalance – bringing it all back home where it inevitably belongs, the baptismal flow of the titular waterway still well intact.

The pick, though, may well be “Glow,” as luminous as its title and almost searing with its deliberative emotive tone, closing out the album in a kind of majestic humility that, once again, and for absolute certain, establishes Bourne as a (ahem) born standard-bearer of the transcendent singer-songwriter class. He may not exhibit the bedizened leitmotifs of the sainted GP but Songs from Motel 43, at the very least, suggests that a copy of the record should be sent to Keith Richards and pronto. A fellow traveler has arrived.

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